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Continued from page 2

Nobody wants to be Mothra. Somebody has to be Mothra.

The mobile market, to steal from a great, is big. Really big. So, if you can keep your team reasonably small and your costs reasonably low - or if you are part of a larger organization - it is perfectly possible to decide that it would be worthwhile to throw your hat into the mobile OS ring.

The only problem being that making a mobile OS is hard. And persuading developers to support your platform, when there are established and profitable markets in Android and iOS, is hard as well. As Palm and then HP found to their cost with WebOS (we could very easily put OpenWebOS into this list of pretenders to the throne), as Blackberry found with the PlayBook, and as even Microsoft has confronted with Windows Phone. There is a reason why many of the challengers above will obligingly work on Android-friendly hardware, and sometimes with Android apps.

Ubuntu has a slightly different value proposition, and a slightly different market - it could make an integration case with the sort of companies which already put Ubuntu on their desktops and laptops. Canonical's CEO, Jane Silber, noted today that Ubuntu remains the leading Linux distro for enterprise, and the kind of company that keeps the Open Source flame burning might welcome the chance to replicate the same experience across all their devices. There is a whiff of the same convergent ideal in Windows 8/RT/Phone 8, although also a lesson in the challenges involved.

Nonetheless, a lot of creativity is currently going into creating operating systems which will never hold more than a splinter of the market. However, a splinter may be enough - to quote Slashdot's "davydagger":

There is a small niche(self included) market segment, that wants a GNU/Linux phone. These people bought the nokia n900. These are probably the most vicious and loyal fanbois there are, and we've been without a standard phone bearer for 3 years already. There is no reason you won't sell 1 million devices to the same people every development cycle.

And the fight between these different systems will throw up new ideas and implementations which will find their way into the next generation of mobile implementations, wherever they come from. And that means that, whether a project team within a megacorporation or an independent band of Scandinavians with a dream, we should be glad of this crush of operating systems, even if we never lay a finger on them.